Project Q Workshop

Last Thursday, artist-in-residence Eric Rosenbaum from the MIT Media Lab shared his latest innovation with some of the Exploratorium community. The prototype, (so new that it only has the working title Project Q) allows a computer to interface physical switches to control any application or game with no extra programming required. The circuit board pretends to be a USB keyboard and mouse and the key presses are triggered by any two conductive surface coming in contact with each other or through having a circuit be completed through the body.

Eric described his development process and shared some possible next directions in his quest to make it really easy for any user to create their own inputs for a wide variety of computer programs. After that, we got out a bunch of pre-made switches, wires, alligator clips, foil, foamies, and other building materials and started playing around. We spent about an hour or two brainstorming ideas, constructing parts, and dancing about the learning studio and then we shared four different initial design concepts that might be starting points for deeper explorations with Project Q.

Walter connected foil switches to his pants and opened up Garage Band. The pieces of the foil on his jeans connected to different key strokes on the computer and the piece of foil in his mouth completed the electrical connection each time he hit the metal on his legs. When hooked up to the sound system in the learning studio he could play a percussion solo just by tapping his pants.

Ryoko made a switch on her cup of tea so that she could post to her twitter feed. She typed in the status update, “Ryoko is drinking tea” and then set up the switch connecting to her bracelet and the cup filled with freshly brewed tea. She connected her body to both parts of the switch by drinking which mimicked the pressing the enter key to send her exploits to friends around the world. I think that this just might possibly be the next big thing (maybe we should patent it).

Sebastian and I created a garden of foil switches that activated a painting program that I quickly made up in Scratch. Blowing on the pieces of foil connected the switches which each corresponded to a key which stamped a paint blob sprite on a quadrant of the screen. Although we had a lot of fun with our breathing exercises, we realized that the program was missing something so we constructed a feather duster switch which cleared the screen when connected to any of the switches on the pegboard. Using project Q with scratch was nice because it allowed for many more inputs than the scratch board which only allows you to connect four physical switches.

Luigi made some foot switches and connected them to a open source dance dance revolution clone. Our geeky dancing abilities have been well documented on the blogosphere, youtube, facebook, and probably twitter.

Here’s the video of the workshop highlights. As you can see, we all had a great time building and trying out these new ideas. Hopefully some or all of these ideas will be returned to in the future as Eric continues to refine this already rich and exciting project.